After two minutes, he flipped onto his back and landed not quite
in the center of a 10,000 square foot net that he'd targeted from
above.

That's not the only crazy skydive to happen in recent years. In
October of 2012, Felix Baumgartner leapt out of a balloon
floating in the stratosphere, 39 kilometers above Earth. Two
years later, that record too was broken,
when Google's Alan Eustace jumped from just over 41
kilometers up.

In extreme sports of all kinds, people are doing things that
would have once been considered impossible or just plain insane.

In 2013, Catalan endurance athlete
Kilian Jornet ran up and down the 14,692-foot-high Matterhorn
in two hours, 42 minutes. The first ascent of that mountain took
approximately two days — and four of the climbers were killed in
an accident.

Freediver
Roberto Reyes begins his practice plunge to 65 feet deep off
Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Freediving fans say it's an adrenaline
rush to plunge without an oxygen tank to staggering depths, using
weights or relying on gravity alone, and see how long they can
remain underwater before what can be the hardest part: coming
back up. "It looks very simple, but it goes beyond that," Reyes
said. "If you do it once, it's addictive. It feels so good that
your body is asking you to return to the
ocean."AP Photo/Ricardo
Arduengo

In one of the most extreme examples, freediving — no oxygen
tanks allowed — has long been the domain of lobster hunters and
pearl divers. But now that it's become an athletic discipline,
people are going deeper than we knew was humanly possible —
sometimes with
deadly consequences. In 1949, scientists thought that going
deeper than 100 feet would kill divers, crushing their lungs.

"What used to happen is there were all these communities of
ultramarathoners, ultra endurance athletes, [and others]," says
Joyner. "There really were subcultures." Those subcultures were
pushing the limits in their sports, but the size of those
communities was extremely limited — at least until we could
easily connect to each other online.

In the past, he explains, you weren't likely to run an
ultramarathon unless you knew other people who were
ultramarathoners in the first place: You wouldn't even know that
it was a thing people did.

A runner in the middle of
the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile run through Death
Valley.David McNew/Getty
Images

You don't push the limits of human performance without being
aware of what those supposed limits are, and the internet has
made us more aware than ever of any seemingly insane
accomplishment out there.

"Now it’s possible for people all over the world to connect via
the internet, and people are getting into some very interesting
things," says Joyner.

The web doesn't just make us aware of the extreme things people
are doing. It also enables us to start to learn those things on
our own. Want to start freediving? You can easily find
communities with starter tips (though please be careful
— it's an extremely dangerous sport). Same for
ultrarunning or pretty much anything else you can imagine.

Joyner warns that sometimes, this ease of access can cause people
to do things they aren't prepared for. But for those who
carefully work their way up to whatever extreme accomplishment
they want to achieve, this is how we'll continue to see that the
perceived limits on human performance are just that: perceived —
until they've been exceeded.